Topics

Waiting, Wondering and Worrying About the Weather

Amy Lamb — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 08:55:00 -0500

: WISH-TV Chief Meteorologist Steve Bray tells viewers what's on the way for March 25, 1913.

Each year, as I prepare for my family’s annual summer trip to Michigan, I pull up the 10-day extended forecast. Without it, I am powerless to pack, as the temperature can fluctuate more than 40 degrees from year to year. If it looks like a lot of rain is heading that way, we might even adjust our travel dates in an effort to enjoy sunnier skies.

While modern weather monitoring and tracking have been beneficial to me on things like this, today’s ability to predict the arrival of severe weather has helped people prepare for (or even flee) catastrophes and saved countless lives. Unfortunately for Hoosiers from a century ago, they couldn’t flip on a television set to get the latest, breaking coverage as events of the Great Flood of 1913 began to unfold. But what if they could have?

To arm our guests with some background and perspective that will help them maximize their experience in our upcoming You Are There 1913: A City Under Water, we teamed up with our friends at WISH-TV 8 to create an imagined but fact-inspired newscast for March 25, 1913 – when the waters were rising in Indianapolis, but the levees had not yet broken.

The report features Daybreak anchor Scott Sander relating local and regional news and a report from chief meteorologist Steve Bray about what weather has contributed to the current situation – as well as what is still on the way. Guests can even catch a phone-in, eyewitness account of the rising waters from 10-year-old Indianapolis resident Adeline Claghorn (voiced by Emma Hermacinski, daughter of WISH-TV reporter Jay Hermacinski).

It’s hard to imagine how modern meteorology would have changed the lives of the characters you’ll meet when you step back in time to the Wulf’s Hall relief station on March 31, 1913. Even so, I think you’ll be inspired by the way Hoosiers were able to band together to help one another in the wake of disaster. I hope you’ll visit us when A City Under Water opens on March 26!

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Amy Lamb is media relations manager at IHS. While she believes in being personable and professional, she also understands the value of having a well-stocked candy dish in her office.

The Resilience of Children - Today and Yesterday

Kim Easton — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 10:00:00 -0500

I couldn't help but tear up while watching the Sandy Hook Choir perform "America the Beautiful" on Super Bowl Sunday. I wasn't alone. All I could think about was what those kids had gone through just weeks ago – losing friends and siblings, experiencing a tragedy we only hope our own children never have to face.

And then I saw this:

: AFP/Getty Images

This is how they left the field. I teared up even more.

It reminded me of photo I came across in our digital image collection while researching the You Are There exhibit we're opening in March. I was looking for "flood sufferers" – survivors of the Great Flood of 1913 that devastated our state. This is what I found:

Children. Smiling. Goofing off. Finding joy.

Of course, we can find resilient kids all through the history books and all through our own photo archives – children who survived wartime, civil unrest, natural disaster, the Great Depression and personal adversity. But right now at the History Center, you can find them in the photos in You Are There 1955: Ending Polio.

Imagine what it was like to be a child back then. Frightened parents kept their kids home – away from public places like pools and movie theaters and even schools. But children persevered. They made their own fun. They rolled up their sleeves for vaccinations. Or maybe they weren't so lucky, like this little girl:

: Boston Children's Hospital Archive

But they kept smiling.

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Kim Easton is communications manager for IHS. She likes to be referred to as a wordsmith but is more often referred to – at least in her department – as a word monkey.

How Instagram Changes the Photo Dating Game

Kim Easton — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 10:25:00 -0400

I came across this photo on a friend's Facebook page. It's a recent shot of her son posing by a 1970s car. She used Instagram's 1977 filter on it. Looks cool, doesn't it? But 50 years from now, what date would a photo expert assign to it?

A little background: Instagram is a photo-sharing program and a social network that allows you to take a photo on your mobile device, apply one of 18 filters if you choose and share it – with the option of also sharing it on your Facebook and Twitter accounts. Instagrammers follow people and have followers, similar to Twitter. It has been around for about two years, but has exploded in popularity. More than 30 million people were using this little app at the beginning of this year, and now they are uploading 58 photos per second. If you're on Facebook, I bet you see several of these square photos every time you log in, whether your friends are over-sharers or not.

Back to the question: How does all this new technology affect how we'll look at photos in years to come? I asked Susan Sutton, IHS's coordinator of visual reference services (that's our fancy way of saying she's our go-to photo expert). "Dating photographs can be a lot of fun, but there are some pitfalls, and I think we won’t know the full effects of the digital age for several years," she says. David Turk, manager of preservation imaging services, agrees. "Even before Instagram, the advance of digital manipulations pretty much changed the way photos are looked at," he says. "Unless you have a physical copy in your hands, dating digital images may be impossible."

What do historians look for when dating photos, and specifically what would they see in this one? "Every photograph offers different challenges and clues," says Susan. "My eye went first to the car visible behind the guy, but he is actually the key element in the photograph. When looking at old images including cars, you can certainly come up with a starting point by dating the car – for example, if the car is an early 1920s model, the image is not from any earlier – but some people keep cars a long time, so you have to try to read license plates, look at signs and look at the clothing of the people in the image. Sometimes dating the clothing doesn't even work because a lot of older people don’t necessarily dress with the trends. We also look at recognizable buildings. The use of a photographic process can help narrow things down if you have the original in your hand."

: This is a real 1970s photo of me and my dad. You don't need to be a professional to get the date right on this gem.

These processes are actually nothing new, though. For many years, photographers have been using filters and techniques that could make an image look older than it is at first glance. Susan says she has a photo in her office that people often think is from the IHS collection, but it’s one her and her husband shot in the mid-1980s. "There are a lot of things people can do with Photoshop that blow my mind – some of them for fun and some deliberately to deceive," she says. "I would never just presume to give a date without seeing the original print or knowing that the scan I am seeing is directly from the original."

So without a reliable date on a digital file – and noting that some files on my MacBook Pro are mysteriously dated Jan. 1, 1909 – would the paper an image is printed on give us a clue? Susan Rogers, our paper conservator, says yes. "There are huge differences in papers from the 1970s versus today - even from year to year with digital papers, " she says. "And those can be detected if you have the right equipment."

So go ahead and have your fun. We'll be ready for it.

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Kim Easton is communications manager for IHS. She likes to be referred to as a wordsmith but is more often referred to – at least in her department – as a word monkey.

From 2x4s to MLK Day

Guest Blogger — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 12:10:00 -0500

I used to believe that all a job took was passion. As long as I found a job I loved doing, then the rest of the work would do itself. But after two quick weeks at the Indiana Historical Society working as an intern, I can’t believe how naive that idea was. Just looking past the coffee cups, cold medicine and smiles, I began to understand how much effort is really given into doing a job correctly, even when the passion is still there.

The first day I arrived ready for anything, or so I thought. It turns out high heels aren’t the best thing to wear when doing deconstruction work. But days two and three of the deconstruction work went much smoother for me. Inventory, dry wall, and 2x4s became part of my daily routine. Everyone at IHS had put in a great effort to build the 1945 grocery store, and now had to watch it be torn down so that a new exhibit could take its place.

The last two days of that week I spent in the Marketing and Public Relations Department assisting where I could with sorting out advertisements, sitting in on meetings and looking through requests from organizations asking for donations so that IHS could send tickets and books. Also, I was given a few different tours through the Conservation Lab, the library and the vault.

My final week was spent with the Interpretation Department following facilitators and watching interpreters interact with museum guests. There were so many different rooms to be in ranging from the fancy Cole Porter Room, to the 1914 violin shop, to Destination Indiana, to the History Lab. Friday morning, I even tagged along to a radio interview as Amy Lamb promoted Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

When Martin Luther King Jr. Day finally came around, so did the guests. People poured into the doors ready for all the available activities the museum has to offer. I assisted in putting on wristbands and directed people as to where things were located.

I have had a great experience interning at the Indiana Historical Society and would strongly encourage other interns to come. There were so many people available and willing to speak with me about their own personal experiences with their jobs, and specifically about IHS.

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Alicia Creasey is a junior at Covenant Christian High School in Indianapolis and completed her school’s “J-Term” internship with the IHS. She enjoys reading, creative writing, theater and spending time with family and friends.

Through a Curtain of Fog

Guest Blogger — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 10:31:47 -0500

As a first-time visitor to Indiana, I discovered that the Indiana Historical Society delivers a surprisingly effective crash course in local history. Instead of reading a pamphlet and traipsing past display cases, I literally stepped into the past in the You Are There rooms. A fog “curtain” created an almost magical screen between the present and the three-dimensional, interactive world of an old photo come to life. Through my conversations in a 1924 auto shop and a 1945 grocery store, I was able to uncover stories that I might have otherwise missed. When an auto mechanic told me about African-Americans being run out of town, I learned about the one-time strength of the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana. Until this encounter, I thought the Klan operated almost exclusively in the South. In contrast, an African-American shopper in the grocery store showed me that by the 1940s, an integrated community thrived in at least one part of the state.

Destination Indiana helped me find answers to questions that the exhibits raised. The virtual journeys led me to learn more about the role of the Klan in Indiana politics and society in the 1920s. It was nice to be able to set the pace as I looked through photos and documents, to zoom in without losing visual clarity, and to find related journeys. Though I was sitting in a dark room with a screen, I hardly felt like a passive viewer.

One of the challenges for historians is convincing the public that old documents and photos can still be relevant. The Indiana Historical Society has found creative ways to put its collection on display, engaging the visitor to do more than just look around. I believe this kind of creativity is what it takes to interest the 21st-century digital generation. It also adds an element of discovery to visiting the History Center. My conversations with the interpreters led me to unexpected places, teaching me far more about Indiana than I ever would have learned from reading a tourist pamphlet.

Clara Silverstein is the Boston-based author of a school desegregation memoir and three cookbooks, including A White House Garden Cookbook (Red Rock Press), a chronicle with recipes of the first year of the Obama vegetable garden. She is working toward a master’s degree in public history from University of Massachusetts-Boston and plans to one day write history books.

Don’t Know Much About His-to-ry

Kim Easton — Mon, 10 May 2010 12:00:00 -0400

When I interviewed for this job at IHS two years ago, one of my interviewers (I blame Ray Boomhower, but I'm not entirely sure it was him) asked, “Do you like history?” Whatever I said must not have been too offensive because I’m sitting here now, but I wondered, “Do I?” Here’s the truth.

: My grandpa, John Patrick Easton. Isn't he handsome?

My grandparents and great-grandparents were immigrants, so my own American history is short. I was born in Connecticut and moved to Indiana when I was in high school. That means I learned a lot about the 13 colonies and literally nothing about Tecumsuh, Lew Wallace or William Henry Harrison.

Yes, I took U.S. History in college with all the other liberal arts students, but it was an 8:30 class, and I can’t say I enjoyed it.

I'm a reader, though, and I’ve always loved reading about people in different times and places. (Does the subject matter – criminals, sensational court cases and conjoined twins – make it less historical?) I’m drawn to European history – I went through a serious French Revolution phase, devouring any book I could get my hands on about Napoleon and Josephine and Marie Antoinette.

Though I’ve probably received most of my U.S. history education from historical fiction, good reviews compelled me to read biographies of Abigail Adams, the Founding Fathers, Abraham Lincoln and even Hoosier Madame C.J. Walker – way before I worked here.

But what brings history home? We say it all the time around here, but it's the stories of ordinary, real people. And the connections we make personally to the past.

This is World War II to me: Memories of my grandfather showing me where his bellybutton should be and telling me it “got shot off in the war.” (To this day, I don’t know if that’s true. My dad won’t tell me. Evidently, sense of humor is an inherited trait.) It’s also my grandmother telling me about riding a hot, overcrowded train with my infant father on her lap to visit her husband on the military base. Those are my stories.

But when I walk into You Are There 1945: Hoosier Home Front at the History Center, I make connections. I look at the ration book in my hand and wonder how I’ll feed my family of five. I hear Mrs. Watson talk about how worried she is that she hasn’t heard from her son in a month, and my heart breaks as the mother of a teenager. It hits home. Yes, I experience it. I’m not a history buff – I’m not even an Indiana girl – and I experience it just the same.

So the answer is, “Yes, I like history.” Or maybe the right answer is, “Who doesn’t?”

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Kim Easton is communications manager for IHS. She likes to be referred to as a wordsmith but is more often referred to – at least in her department – as a word monkey.

How Do We Look?

Kim Easton — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 19:30:00 -0500

It's been a crazy year for the IHS staff even though the History Center has pretty much been closed the whole time. What have we been doing with our time? Two words: Indiana Experience.

We've turned our beautiful building into a real destination – a place you'll want to visit again and again. You might remember that we tested the waters with some pilot programs in 2008 – Destination Indiana and You Are There.

Destination Indiana had 44 virtual journeys through the state when we first introduced it. Now, there are 188 – something for everyone. You could spend hours just in there. Who knew the History Center could be so high-tech?

Maybe you remember You Are There 1945: Hoosier Home Front – it's the Terre Haute grocery store we so painstakingly re-created from one of the photos in our collection. It's back because you liked it so much, and we've even added some new characters to the mix. We're also proud to present two new You Are Theres that will take you back to 1914 and 1924.

Our Grand Opening is Saturday, March 20, and it can't come soon enough for all of us. We can't wait to show you what we've been doing. If there is such a thing as a cutting edge in the history world, we're on it.

And our Web site is another story. We started over. From scratch. And we are so happy to bring you a site that is easy to navigate and has something for everyone who visits – teachers, students, family history buffs, serious researchers and just people looking for something to do in Indianapolis.

Well, what do you think? Does our new look suit us?

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Kim Easton is communications manager for IHS. She likes to be referred to as a wordsmith but is more often referred to – at least in her department – as a word monkey.